Not Objective Enough

It’s typical for Protestants to criticize Catholics for “objectifying” the sacraments and making them purely mechanical channels of grace, where faith is irrelevant. That’s a caricature of genuine Catholic teaching, but put that to the side. There’s a case to be made for the opposite view, though, that Catholic sacramental theology is not objective enough .

Consider two statements by Catholic theologians on the relation of sacraments and its effects, the first from Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism : “The effective cause of grace is exclusively Christ himself, who proclaims and effects his gracious will through signs determined by himself. Primarily, therefore, and in actu primo , grace is a free gift and favor, a thing already guaranteed by the sacramental act apart from all personal effort. But whether I shall effectively grasp this grace which is thus provided and profit by it, that is to say, whether it will set up in me the state of justification or perfect that state, that depends on the earnestness with which I have opened my soul to the grace offered me and prepare myself for the reception of the sacrament. Therefore the Catholic conception of a sacrament, so far as regards the personal appropriation of the sacramental grace, presupposes the ethico-religious cooperation of the recipient” (26-27). Adam’s statement, obviously, reflects a Catholic understanding of justification not as a forensic status before God but as a transformation of the person that involves a synergism of grace and pious effort.

The second is from Piet Fransen :

“The dogmatic principle of this is very simple. We are justified and sanctified as free and responsible persons ; and this free acceptance in faith belongs essentially to the process of any infusion of grace, and therefore also of any sacramental grace.”

In responding to statements like these, Berkhouwer perceptively comments in his Studies in Dogmatics: The Sacraments : “Those who understand even slightly the Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation will not be surprised by this synthesis between subjectivity and objectivity, for it involves ultimately the same motive that pervaded the entire doctrine of salvation, namely, the synthesis of grace and freedom, or, one could say, the problem of human co-operation in salvation. Objectivity and disposition work with each other, as do grace and freedom, and preparation and the act of God; and they limit each other. In the doctrine of ex opere operato the problem of preparation arises, and the problem of co-operation in the process of salvation.”

Because Protestantism renounces this synthesis, and because Protestant soteriology makes so much of status , it’s (arguably) has a more objective view of the gifts given in baptism than Catholic theology does. According to the Westminster Confession, a baptized child is brought into the visible church, which is the house and family of God. That obviously doesn’t guarantee eternal salvation, but it is a favorable status before God, and it’s a status that doesn’t depend on the cooperation of the child at all. With their more intimate linking of baptism and justification, Lutherans even more strongly affirm the objectivity of baptismal grace.

(Thanks to Eduardo J. Echeverria for the paper from which these quotations are drawn.)